Slow Graphics Performance MacOS High Sierra

It seems that installing the NVIDIA driver works for me. Once installed you get a new NVIDIA preference pane where you can choose to use the NVIDIA driver or the bundled macOS driver. Worth a shot.

For macOS 10.13.0:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/126157/en-us

For macOS 10.13.1:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/126538/en-us

I have also been experiencing the same type issues on on my 2012 MacBook Pro (9,1) and just spent a day restoring to a Sierra. My MacBook configuration:

2.6 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2 GB

Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD

The overall performance improvement and system stability has been significant going back to Sierra. The other significant discovery I made was that High Sierra was the root cause for a problem I had been struggling to resolve associated with some software I had developed using Xcode that uses custom map overlays (MKTileOverlay) which worked fine in iOS but was experiencing all kinds of performance issues in MacOS.

Bottom line, I am so glad that I invested the time to go back to Sierra and at the same time very disappointed to find an OS (High Sierra) that was touted primarily as as performance/stablity release is riddled with so many SIGNIFICANT problems (including the root password debacles).

A couple other interesting pieces of information from my experience

• Sierra was able to see a read from a APFS drive (Note, I didn't actually use this capability in my restoration)
• Sierra was not able to delete a APFS volume. I had to boot from a High Sierra clone to remove the APFS volume so that I could create the HFS volume

For anyone interested, the following was my process to recovery

• Created a full bootable clone of High Sierra using CCC
• Restored from a previous CCC clone (which was actually a 6 month old El-Capitan CCC image.... I am normally fairly conservative upgrading to new OS on my production machine....)
• Upgraded E Capitan to Sierra
• Upgraded my apps to the latest versions
• Restored my key critical data that is synced via Synology Cloud Station and Dropbox and the few remaining items such as VMWARE Fusion VM's from the High Sierra Clone
• Created a new full clone of the newly restored system.
• Kicked myself for not having a more recent clone with Sierra... Kicked myself twice for not following my process of waiting 6 months after a new release of an OS before upgrading.

My bottom line recommendations

• If you haven't upgraded to High Sierra, DON'T.... There have been way too many critical issues. This is especially true if you use your Mac for any type of critical activities.
• If you are using High Sierra and are experiencing some of these same issues AND you have a recent clone, then strongly consider testing, restoring and recovering....
• If you are using High Sierra and are experiencing some of these same issue AND you have a don't have recent clone, then weigh the options... It is definitely a huge investment of time... but based on the slow response from Apple specifically on this issue and with the other issues that have recently been highlighted, in the long run, it may be your best alternative.

Good luck (and Happy Holidays!)

High Sierra Graphics Performance Issue (Nvidia GPU)

After months of suffering, I found a remedy: Nvidia Web Drivers. Basically an Nvidia maintained version of video card drivers.

For some reason, video card drivers on macOS is in Apple's hand. Apple does not release stand alone video card drivers, they include this in macOS releases. However, Nvidia does have its own version of drivers, and they are called Nvidia Web Drivers. It has nothing to do with Web. It's just a differentiator from the Apple-provided driver.

Nvidia does not list these drivers on its website. But if you search for 'nvidia web driver mac' + macOS version (aka. 10.13.3) in Google, you will find a bunch of download links listed in various blogs, posts, etc, which really are links from Nvidia's website.

After installed this driver, my performance issues were completely gone. Everything runs perfectly just like it did in Yosemite era. It even resolved the freeze issue when sometimes my MacBook Pro awakes from sleep when my 4k external monitor is connected.

If you have a Nvidia GPU model this is definitely worth trying. Hope this helps. Thanks.

editkid solution seems to be helping

editkid wrote:

It seems that installing the NVIDIA driver works for me. Once installed you get a new NVIDIA preference pane where you can choose to use the NVIDIA driver or the bundled macOS driver. Worth a shot.

For macOS 10.13.0:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/126157/en-us

For macOS 10.13.1:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/126538/en-us

Adding another data point. Same problem here as I'm on a Late 2013 Macbook Pro (Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB / NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2GB).

Did not want to downgrade to Sierra, just yet!, and tried the latest Nvidia drivers [WebDriver-378.10.10.10.20.109.pkg, compatible with current 10.13.1 build with the Apple Root-login security patch on top]. Performance seems to be back to Sierra levels using this driver for the 750M. Fingers crossed.

Shocking that this ever made it through Q&A...

You have a lot of old software. Parallels version is too old for High Sierra, for example.

You also have some "appcleaner" - never install anything that claims to "clean" your mac.

Here the easiest and secure way to get your mac back:

1) Make a full bootable BACKUP using SuperDuper! or CCC. Also have an up to date Time Machine backup.

2) Make a bootable installer of High Sierra on a thumb drive. Instructions are available online, for example here:

macOS High Sierra: How to make a bootable USB installation drive ...

3) Restart from the installer drive created above, erase your internal drive using Disk Utility, and proceed to install

3a) When asked if you want to migrate, choose the bootable clone created in step 1), and ***most importantly*** s

elect to migrate only the user accounts - NOT applications and settings.

4) Test. You will be surprised at how much faster things are.

5) Gradually install the applications you really need/want.

Apple senior advisor told me that the drivers are built into the OS. Is this not true?

I already mentioned this problem in previous posts on this thread. It is much more complex than Apple is telling you.

Apple and its vendors of built-in graphics are supposed to be working together to produce appropriate drivers for new graphics chips and new versions of MacOS.

With AMD chips, AMD releases specifications that are detailed enough that Apple can modify their existing drivers for most MacOS changes. AMD then commits some resources to help Apple get Apple Drivers working if they run into trouble.

With NVIDIA chips, NVIDIA considers some very intricate details of its specs proprietary, and will not tell Vendors how the chips work at a minute enough level to produce trouble-free Drivers.

What is supposed to happen, is NVIDIA is supposed to produce a new driver, ready for Apple testing, far enough ahead so that Apple can make sure it all works. In this case, (and many others) they have not done so in a timely fashion, so the TESTED Driver included in MacOS is OLD, and that is what you get when you listen to Apple say, "the Drivers are included in MacOS".

Readers here have seem this happen so many time before, that they check the NVIDIA web site to see if there are more recent Drivers that NVIDIA has released on its own. This is NOT the way Apple intends this process to work, and these Drivers have not been through Apple's rigorous testing. But in some cases, these drivers may work better.

Hi,

I followed some of the hints here and on the internet, so that i arrived on http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us. As you may have read, despite the fix offered end of Sept, the CUDA driver for Mac are still pending.

On the link above there is the section "Beta, Older drivers and more." The fifth bullet point is the solution (even only as beta), i downloaded and installed the newest one (released on Dec 8th): CUDA 387.99 driver for MAC.

The installation was successful and so far it seems to have dramatically improved the situation at my end (iMac Late 2013, 8GB Ram, NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 1 GB).

Let's hope, fingers crossed!

If you got external monitor plugged external graphic card (NVIDIA) is active, without external monitor internal graphic (Intel) is active (mostly)

try Releases · steveschow/gfxCardStatus · GitHub

intel graphic is without performance issues, nvidia not

Hi Luis,

I'm sorry but I can confirm it is NOT a hardware issue, certainly in my case.

Using High Sierra, I found many websites using WebGL very slow, most application using OpenGL very slow, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all to be impossible to use, although not all of the time, just most of the time. using iStatMenus I was able to see the frame rate of whichever GPU my laptop was using, when things were slow it would drop to one or two frames per second. Unusable.

Over Christmas I backed up, reformatted and reinstalled my laptop with Sierra. Installed the same software I have been using, everything was faster, iStatMenus showed frame rates of 40-60 frames per second. This was using the same hardware. The problem was caused by High Sierra.

One site I found to be terrible, under High Sierra, was windy.com, for predicting wind/weather and routes for sailing, this would drop the frame rate down to 2 frames per second, in Sierra, it averages 45 frames per second, animations are smooth, compared to having to wait for the pointer to move so I can wait for it to respond to a click. I also use a similar app from the Mac App Store 'predict wind' which gave similar problems, but under Sierra, it performs great, same with Adobe apps too.

I have an early 2013 Retina MacBook Pro 15" with 16gb ram and an SSD, it has an intel HD4000 onboard gpu and Nvidia GT650m with 1gb ram, the machine spec is certainly within the parameters for running High Sierra, and the graphics cards although both are slower than those in current gen laptops, are more than capable of the spec required by apple for utilising the Metal2 architecture.

I have had this issue too since High Sierra 10.13, and it didn’t get better with updates (still present on 10.13.3). I have a Early 2013 MacBook Pro (Intel HD 4000 + nVidia GT 650m).

I did some testing, using iStat Menus to check which GPU is active and how much GPU memory is used.

So, in my experience:

1. When the integrated GPU is active, everything is fine.

Scrolling and every other macOS transition (changing space, opening mission control, etc…) are smooth as they should be and smoother than they was on Sierra.

iStat Menus show a GPU memory usage of around 25-40%.

2. If the discrete nVidia 650m GPU is active (because Photoshop and/or some other software that trigger discrete GPU activation are open) and Safari or another browser are open, the GPU memory usage is between 115% and 175%! and every transition is sluggish, and macOS is almost unusable. Multitasking between apps is very slow and you have to wait a second or two at every front app focus switch. Scrolling down in a webpage in browsers is awfully jerky.

3. If the discrete nVidia 650m GPU is active, but Safari is closed or I disable hardware acceleration in Chrome or Firefox, the graphic memory usage is still high, between 75% and 105%, but the general feel is waaay better, much less sluggish.

I don’t have game benchmark from when I had Sierra installed, but full screen games are still playable, maybe there is a performance hit but is much less noticeable than the macOS transitions and browsers scrolling.

I tried to install nVidia Driver but I didn’t see big improvements, same very high GPU memory usage. But I had a lot of graphic glitches so I reverted to original Apple driver.

I also tried a clean install of 10.13.3 on a separate partition, no luck, the bug behaves exactly the same.

So I suggest to use Chrome or Firefox with hardware acceleration disabled when the discrete GPU is active, until the bug is fixed (if it will ever be).

Do someone know if hardware acceleration can be disabled in Safari?

Can someone with a AMD GPU and iStat Menus installed do the same tests I did, just to know if the bug is present for them also?

I finally rolled back to Sierra 10.12.6. Everything is really smooth again and I don’t have to deal with nasty bugs

The biggest new features of High Sierra (for my use) are in Safari, and you can install Safari 11 on Sierra too.

This is the first time ever that I had to rollback to a previous macOS version, and I use OS X since Tiger. Also Lion was slower than Snow Leopard, but it has nice new features and most bugs and slow down were solved with 10.7.2. I never felt the need to rollback.

High Sierra was advertised as a performance improvements and bug fix release, but…

APFS caused:

• Much slower boot time.

• Long delay in moving a file on desktop, dragging an attachment out of mail, saving a screenshot, if a finder extension in system preferences is active (like Dropbox or Google Backup and Sync)

Windowserver on Metal 2 caused:

• The bug we’re discussing in this thread, the OS is unusable on MacBook Pros with an nVidia GPU, when the discrete GPU is activated. The only way to get around this is to open no more than one App (between those that trigger the Discrete GPU, plus the browsers) at the same time. You can imagine the impact on workflow.

• Other bugs with external monitors (I couldn’t test this)

I had some other small bugs with fonts that were not present in Sierra, that were slowing my workflow too.

NONE of those bugs is solved in 10.13.3 or in 10.13.4 beta, and this is a first in my experience, 10.XX.2 versions were usually much more stable. I sent feedback for every bug I found since 10.13 is out, but I saw no improvements.

Not to mention the critical security bug that Apple had to face since the launch of High Sierra, luckily those were fixed in a matter of days.

Since I had to format the SSD, I obviously tried a clean install of 10.13.3 before rolling back to 10.12.6, but every bug was still there, as stated by everyone on this and other threads.

All of this (isolating the issue, testing and especially rollback) was a HUGE waste of time, and I sincerely hope that Apple will go back to a 2 years (or more, why not) release cycle. The quality control and beta testing is simply awful nowadays.

macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 on MacBook Pro Retina Early 2013, nVidia GeForce GT 650M (now on 10.12.6)

I also have this exact problem on my 2012 retina macbook pro. I don't even do anything graphically-intensive but it's still unbearably laggy when the discrete GPU is in use. The only solution I've found for the time being is to use the gfxCardStatus app to force the use of the integrated GPU which doesn't suffer from any kind of performance problems. It's ridiculous that a less powerful GPU is less laggy than the more powerful one and it clearly looks to me like a driver issue which Apple has to fix ASAP but apparently couldn't care less about.

Again, it's High Sierra's Metal2 and the Windowserver process that is creating the problem. The only solution is to run at your monitor's Default resolution, set in Displays Preferences. On my system, I can also run at the far right "More Space" option and I have no lag or slowdown.

Any other resolution choice other than Default or "More Space" on my 4k monitor lags out.

I'm not sure why this is happening, but my guess is that Metal2 doesn't handle the scaling properly, making it require far too many GPU or CPU resources, which lags the Windowserver process and thus creates the screen lag/graphic performance problems. The older your laptop, the more aware of the lag you'll be. This happens on brand new Macbook Pro Touchbars as well - you just have to look very carefully for it, because the faster CPU and GPU compensate for it much quicker so you don't notice is as much as with an older machine.

It's an Apple bug to fix. The only thing you can do is wait it out, upgrade to a faster Mac, run at your external monitor's native resolution, or revert back to Sierra which requires a copy of the Sierra installer, and a complete computer format and reinstall.

On my mid 2014 MBP with external display running on 3200x1800 the performance was terrible, especially when Android Studio was running.

I installed the latest web driver for 10.13.6, linked on this site: https://www.tonymacx86.com/nvidia-drivers/

And now it seems that fixed the problem or at least really improved it.